David Brooks on "The Four American Narratives"

New York Times op-ed contributor David Brooks — my favorite columnist — recently wrote about "The Four American Narratives." He said that they are one of the main reasons we are so divided politically.

There are four of these stories, Brooks says:

1. The libertarian narrative.
2. The narrative of globalized America.
3. The story of multicultural America.
4. The narrative of America First.

The libertarian narrative is all about "the dynamism of the free market" and values freedom above all other things. It is, says Brooks, the story that "America is a land of free individuals responsible for their own fate." Yet Brooks cites this from a speech by writer George Packer: "the libertarian idea in its current shape regards Americans as consumers, entrepreneurs, workers, taxpayers — indeed everything except citizens."

There is also in today's Republican mix President Trump's America First insistence, about which Brooks quotes Packer: “America First is the conviction that the country has lost its traditional identity because of contamination and weakness — the contamination of others, foreigners, immigrants, Muslims; the weakness of elites who have no allegiance to the country because they’ve been globalized.”

We liberals and progressives prefer globalized America and multicultural America. The former, per Packer, "comes with an exhilarating ideology of flattening hierarchies, disrupting systems, discarding old elites and empowering individuals." Yet, per Brooks, "when you disrupt old structures you end up concentrating power in fewer hands." The idea of concentrating power in fewer and fewer hands is, or should be, offensive to us liberals and progressives. And this puts us on the left in a serious bind, since we progressives are generally on the side of globalism, trade associations, and internationalism.

In multicultural America, we see (says Packer) "Americans as members of groups, whose status is largely determined by the sins of the past and present. ... During the Obama years it became a largely unexamined dogma among cultural elites." Hence this narrative specifically alienates many non-elite voters who helped put Trump over the top in 2016. Thus it is not likely to be a narrative that puts Democrats back in power.

So none of these four narratives can unify us as a nation. The libertarian outlook devalues the obligations that citizens have to each other and to the republic. America First devalues the obligations America has to the rest of the world, e.g., by snuffing out rather than fostering pacts that address climate change. The globalism narrative saps individuals' control over their own lives and destinies by putting power in the hands of a shrinking few. Multiculturalism tends to pit America's social groups against one another.

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Brooks proposes that we instead look to "Michael Lind’s fascinating essay 'The New Class War'" for guidance. We ought now to consider the following two "models":

• The mercantilist model.
• The model of "the talented community."

The first of these, the mercantilist model, Brooks suggests, is wholly inadequate and inappropriate. It

... sees America not as the culmination of history but as one major power in competition with rival powers, like China, Russia, Europe and so on. In this, to be American is to be a member of the tribe, and the ideal American is the burly protector of his tribe. America’s government and corporations should work closely together to “protect our jobs” and beat back rival powers. Immigration and trade should be closely controlled and foreign entanglements reduced. 

Sound familiar? Hello, Donald Trump! The "talented community" model, Brooks believes, is the right way to go:

This story sees America as history’s greatest laboratory for the cultivation of human abilities. This model welcomes diversity, meritocracy, immigration and open trade for all the dynamism these things unleash. But this model also invests massively in human capital, especially the young and those who suffer from the downsides of creative destruction. In this community, the poor boy and girl are enmeshed in care and cultivation. Everything is designed to arouse energy and propel social mobility.

I'm inclined to agree. Yet I see our current cultural problems — and, therefore, our political and economic ones — as running far deeper than those things which can be addressed just by adopting policies designed to facilitate this "talented community" of ours. Yes, diversity, meritocracy, immigration and open trade are all good things. Investing massively in human capital is both necessary and good. But we need to address something more fundamental: our increasing tendency toward selfishness.

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David Brooks talks about the bitter fruits of President Trump's own personal selfishness in his column "Donald Trump Poisons the World." Referring to the notion "that selfishness is the sole driver of human affairs," he calls it "the epitome of the Trump project." Trump's own "core worldview," says Brooks, is that "life is nakedly a selfish struggle for money and dominance."

Put another way, the idea that epitomizes Trump is that life is a vast zero-sum game. The only way we can win is for our adversaries to lose. This is true in sports, contests of strength, war, and Texas Hold'em poker. It is not, however, generally true. Rather, life on earth and human civilizations have advanced by playing positive-nonzero-sum games in which win-win scenarios can be, and are, brought to fruition. (See the book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright.)

The selfishness that goes with playing zero-sum, winners-vs.-losers games pervades our popular culture, though. We see it in such phenomena as our addiction to the dystopian Hunger Games novels and films. Most of our thinking about economic matters is suffused in such a jealous, if-they-win-I-lose belief system. And this kind of selfish thinking even pervades our romantic lives today — witness, say, the growth of "revenge porn."

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So, back to "The Four American Narratives." In it, David Brooks talks of our erstwhile "unifying national story" as:

... an Exodus story. It was the story of leaving the oppressions of the Old World, venturing into a wilderness and creating a new promised land. In this story, America was the fulfillment of human history, the last best hope of earth. That story rested upon an amazing level of national self-confidence. It was an explicitly Judeo-Christian story, built on a certain view of God’s providential plan.

Brooks is here summarizing (and to an extent giving up on) an earlier column, "The Unifying American Story." Giving up? I'm afraid so, inasmuch as Brooks writes:

... that civic mythology no longer unifies. American confidence is in tatters and we live in a secular culture. As a result, we’re suffering through a national identity crisis. Different groups see themselves living out different national stories and often feel they are living in different nations.

The immigrant groups that built America, Brooks's earlier column says, "could endure every hardship because they were serving in a spiritual drama and not just a financial one."

Financial dramas are often win-win. As Michael Douglas's character Gordon Gekko says in the movie Wall Street:

... greed — for lack of a better word — is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind.

However, spiritual dramas are characterized by positive-nonzero-sum outcomes. The term "religion" comes from a Latin root that means "obligation, bond, reverence." In spiritual dramas, we are bound together in a mutual all-for-one-and-one-for-all philosophy. The rise of civilization has involved (see Robert Wright's book) manifesting just such an all-encompassing philosophy.

Hence, if we continue to lose our spirituality, we are in grave danger of losing our civilization.